Emperor Charles V, Impresario of War


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John Hawkwood


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John Hawkwood was fourteenth-century Italy's most notorious and successful soldier. A man known for cleverness and daring, he was the most feared mercenary in Renaissance Italy. Born in England, Hawkood began his career in France during the Hundred Years' War and crossed into Italy with the famed White Company in 1361. From that time until his death in 1394, Hawkwood fought throughout the peninsula as a captain of armies in times of war and as a commander of marauding bands during times of peace. He achieved international fame, and his acquaintances included such prominent people as Geoffrey Chaucer, Catherine of Siena, Jean Froissart, and Francis Petrarch. City-states constantly tried to outbid each other for his services, for which he received money, land, and in the case of Florence, citizenship -- a most unusual honor for an Englishman. When Hawkwood died, the Florentines buried him with great ceremony in their cathedral, an honor denied their greatest poet, Dante. His final resting place, however, is disputed. Historian William Caferro's ambitious account of Hawkwood is both a biography and a study of warfare and statecraft. Caferro has mined more than twenty archives in England and Italy, creating an authoritative portrait of Hawkwood as an extraordinary military leader, if not always an admirable human being. Caferro's Hawkwood possessed a talent for dissimulation and craft both on the battlefield and at the negotiating table, and, ironically, managed to gain a reputation for "honesty" while beating his Italian hosts at their own game of duplicity and manipulation. In addition to a thorough account of Hawkwood's life and career, Caferro's study offers a fundamental reassessment of the Italian military situation and of the mercenary system. Hawkwood's career is treated not in isolation but firmly within the context of Italian society, against the backdrop of unfolding crises: famine, plague, popular unrest, and religious schism. Indeed, Hawkwood's life and career offer a unique vantage point from which we can study the economic, social, and political impacts of war. -- John France




Charles V and the Castilian Assembly of the Clergy


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The Castilian Assembly of the Clergy has been overlooked in the scholarship on church-state relations and representative institutions in the early modern period. This oversight has distorted our understanding of political practice, royal finance, and church-state relations in sixteenth-century Castile. By examining the negotiations for subsidies between the crown and the Assembly, this book illuminates the dynamics between church and state and the limits of royal control over the church, and it challenges long-held conventions about the monolithic structure of the Spanish church and its subservience to the crown. The negotiations for subsidies also demonstrate the importance of consensus in the political process and how the Assembly sustained itself and its privileges for centuries through collaboration with the crown.




Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief in Reformation Germany


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When Martin Luther mounted his challenge to the Catholic Church, reform stimulated a range of responses, including radical solutions such as those proposed by theologians of the Anabaptist movement. But how did ordinary Anabaptists, men and women, grapple with the theological and emotional challenges of the Lutheran Reformation? Anabaptism developed along unique lines in the Lutheran heartlands in central Germany, where the movement was made up of scattered groups and did not centre on charismatic leaders as it did elsewhere. Ideas were spread more often by word of mouth than by print, and many Anabaptists had uneven attachment to the movement, recanting and then relapsing. Historiography has neglected Anabaptism in this area, since it had no famous leaders and does not seem to have been numerically strong. Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief challenges these assumptions, revealing how Anabaptism's development in central Germany was fundamentally influenced by its interaction with Lutheran theology. In doing so, it sets a new agenda for understandings of Anabaptism in central Germany, as ordinary individuals created new forms of piety which mingled ideas about brotherhood, baptism, the Eucharist, and gender and sex. Anabaptism in this region was not an isolated sect but an important part of the confessional landscape of the Saxon lands, and continued to shape Lutheran pastoral affairs long after scholarship assumed it had declined. The choices these Anabaptist men and women made sat on a spectrum of solutions to religious concerns raised by the Reformation. Understanding their decisions, therefore, provides new insights into how religious identities were formed in the Reformation era.




The Sixteenth Century


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This new volume in the Short Oxford History of Europe series looks at the sixteenth century - one of the most tumultuous and dramatic periods of social and cultural transformation in European history. Six leading experts consider this period from a variety of perspectives, including political, social, economic, religious, and intellectual history, and subject traditional explanations of all these areas to revision in light of the most modern scholarship. - ;The sixteenth century witnessed some of the most abrupt and traumatic transformations ever seen in European society and culture. Populatio.




Spain and the Protestant Reformation


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For Charles V and Philip II, both of whom expected to continue the momentum of the Reconquista into a campaign against Islam, the theology and political successes of Martin Luther and John Calvin menaced not just the possibility of a universal empire, but the survival of the Habsburg monarchy. Moreover, the Protestant Reformation stimulated changes within Spain and other Habsburg domains, reinvigorating the Spanish Inquisition against new enemies, reinforcing Catholic orthodoxy, and restricting the reach of the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution. This book argues that the Protestant Reformation was an existential threat to the Catholic Habsburg monarchy of the sixteenth century and the greatest danger to its political and religious authority in Europe and the world. Spain’s war on the Reformation was a war for the future of Europe, in which the Spanish Inquisition was the most effective weapon. This war, led by Charles V and Philip II was in the end a triumphant failure: Spain remained Catholic, but its enemies embraced Protestantism in an enduring way, even as Spain’s vision for a global monarchy faced military, political, and economic defeats in Europe and the broader world. Spain and the Protestant Reformation will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in the history and society of Early Modern Spain.




Warfare and the Age of Printing (4 vols.)


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An important part of the Dutch national treasure of early printed books from before 1801 on military and related subjects is kept in military libraries and collections. This catalogue contains 10,000 books in twelve different languages dated 1500–1800 from nine different Defence institutions/collections, representing both Army and Navy. By far the largest collections are the property of the Royal Netherlands Army Museum in Delft and the Royal Netherlands Military Academy in Breda. A great if not substantial part of these books is especially of international significance because of the contents, the intrinsic value or as historical objects. It took eight years to trace and describe these books, all of which have been given extensive analytical bibliographic descriptions. The book includes over 2000 illustrations. The book is a project of the Royal Netherlands Army Museum, Delft




Witness of the Body


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"Beginning with the persecution of early Christians by the Roman Empire, Witness of the Body explores the place of martyrdom in the church through all ages -- and into the future. Throughout, it reminds readers that Christian martyrdom is neither a quick ticket to heaven nor a cheap political ploy, but rather the firm and faithful witness of Christ's church in a hostile world."--From publisher description.